Beyond the Money, the Great Wisconsin Recall Election of 2012 Has Been the Fight Our Democracy Deserves

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KENOSHA, Wisconsin — Russ Feingold was in a UAW Hall off Washington Street here in the southeast corner of a confounded state, stumping on the eve of the recall election for Democratic candidate Tom Barrett. In his mind, though, Feingold was back sitting in the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, watching the work of his political lifetime slowly being taken apart. "Of course," the former senator said, "I attended the oral arguments on Citizens United with Senator John McCain and we came out of there thinking, 'We can't believe this.'" McCain and Feingold had labored long and hard on the campaign-finance reform bill that bore their names, and they left the Supreme Court that day in March of 2009 with the gallows in their eyes.

"They didn't strike down McCain-Feingold," he continued. "They knocked down this huge brick wall on which we'd built McCain-Feingold. They knocked down the law Teddy Roosevelt signed. I am amazed that they did that. It was one of the most lawless decisions in the history of our nation. The questions that Roberts and Kennedy asked were very disturbing. They were acting like, 'Well, why shouldn't corporations be able to do this?' Well, because for 100 years, the people decided that having robber barons run the country might not be a good idea. They thought they had the right to knock down a law that Teddy Roosevelt signed, and this race is one of their stepchildren."

The money has been the great gravitational force not only of the campaign to dismount governor Scott Walker itself, but also of the narrative that has surrounded it. Down the stretch, as he has found his feet and began to narrow the gap between himself and the incumbent, Barrett has made a weapon out of the amount of money that Walker has received from various out-of-state billionnaires and assorted conservative sugar daddies, even chaffing Walker's loyalty to the hometown Brewers because Joe Ricketts, the batshit plutocrat who is the patriarch of the current ownership of the Chicago Cubs, had kicked in a couple of hundred thousand dollars to Walker campaign.

"I know that Governor Walker wants to make this a national race," Barrett said at his final rally here on Monday night. "This is, and should be, about the values of Wisconsin, not about his national ambitions, not about his wanting to be the poster boy for the Tea Party. I don't want this state to be the experimental dish for the right wing. That's why people look at this and say, 'This is wrong. Why is this governor raising 60 or 70 percent of his money from out-of-state? Why does he have his own criminal defense fund?' It just doesn't add up."

The more I watch things out here, from Madison to Milwaukee and the restaurants to the courtrooms, I realize that the money — as stupefying in its amounts as it undoubtedly is — is also a great distraction. The easy narrative is that this election has been about "the air war and the ground war." (I swear, another week, and Ed Schultz was going to start sounding like Rommel.) That it was about "owning the airwaves" against "boots on the ground." But what I've come to realize is that, from the first moment the first protester stepped onto the lawn of the capitol in Madison 16 months ago until the polls close tonight, the Great Wisconsin Recall has been an extended argument against narcotic centrism and anesthetic civility. This has been a brawl, from start to finish. The local papers are full of stories about families that have divided up over the recall, about divorces that have been sought because a Walker husband found that having a Barrett wife — or, to be fair, vice versa — amounted to an irreconcilable difference. The money and the boots on the ground are only the media through which the two campaigns have carried on an angry and divisive debate. And, for all Barrett's talk about ending the "civil war" that he says Walker started, the anger and divisiveness were perfectly appropriate, and I thank god for them. For once, anyway, all the talk about how Americans don't care about politics, how disengaged and removed from our obligations to the political commonwealth we've become, have been refuted for the moment by what's gone on in Wisconsin.

What we have here is a fight, out in the open, without nuance or euphemism, between two ideas of what self-government should look like, who it should serve, and how, and how wide the parameters of participation will be. That is serious business. It ought to be contested fiercely and to the last and without cosmetic conciliation. Scott Walker made a firm stand against public-employee unions, and did so in a way that ran contrary to a proud tradition of progressive politics in a state that takes those politics very, very seriously. The only bust in the state capitol building here is of Senator Robert LaFollette, Sr., Fightin' Bob, of whom John Dos Passos wrote, in The 42nd Parallel:

"In the parlor of the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee during the state fair, Boss Sawyer the lumber king tried to bribe him to influence his brother-in-law who was presiding judge over the prosecution of the Republican state treasurer; Bob La Follette walked out of the hotel in a white rage. From that time it was war without quarter with the Republican machine in Wisconsin until he was elected governor and wrecked the Republican machine; this was the ten years war that left Wisconsin the model state where the voters, orderloving Germans and Finns, Scandinavians fond of their own opinion, learned to use the new leverage, direct primaries, referendum and recall."

If it took 10 years of hard politics to clean out the railroad and timber barons who had ground up the working class, LaFollette was ready to fight for every second of those 10 years, and he expected nothing less from his opponents. That's why they called him Fightin' Bob LaFollette. This is not a state with a history of being shy and retiring in its political life. It is a state that takes good-government seriously enough to fight hard and half-dirty to keep it.

And so they finished up on Tuesday night, Barrett in the UAW Hall in Kenosha and, later, Walker in the Serb Hall on the southwest side of Milwaukee, a political landmark — with the best Friday night fish fry in the city — that had belonged to Democrats going back to the day when Jack Kennedy, fresh off the Cuban Missile Crisis, came out and campaigned there for Clem Zablocki in the 1962 midterm congressional elections. Barrett was unrelenting in his attempts to paint Walker as a willing tool of the emerging plutocratic control of American politics.

"Many of us saw that video where he said it was the first step. If you're a member of the UAW, you know what that means," Barrett declaimed. "If you're a carpenter, or a painter, even if you're not part of a union, you know what that means. It means they're going after the middle class, and the people who want to be middle class. Scott Walker has said he was going to divide and conquer. He has succeeded in dividing. We will show this nation that Scott Walker will never conquer the middle class of America.... It's just cynical. You know that there's something wrong when your governor is raising 70 percent of his money in $250,000 and $500,000 checks.... He says he doesn't want Wisconsin to look like Milwaukee, and he insults the city he led for nine years. I'll tell you this — I don't want Wisconsin to look like Texas."

Later, as night fell over Milwaukee, Walker rocked the Serb Hall, presenting himself as a man of courage and big ideas who is trying to move Wisconsin forward, only to be stymied by backward-thinking Democrats and out-of-state "special interests." (We pause here for a moment to laugh loudly enough that the Koch Brothers to hear us.) The governor's speech was just as spirited as Barrett's was, but oddly disjointed. "Isn't it amazing," he asked the crowd, "that politics is the only business where you get credit for courage just for keeping your word?" He also deplored the recall for what he said was the uncertainty it had created among the "job creators" and the small-business community in the state. "Truth," he told the crowd, "is on our side."

Out in the parking lot, I fell into conversation with Phil Waseleski, who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the U.S. Postal Service that was festooned with Scott Walker buttons. Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.

"A friend once told me, 'Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,'" Phil told me. "I politely told him, 'Dave, we're gonna have to agree to disagree.' I could have told him, 'Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.'

"The politicians, I think, it's a tough call, because if you don't keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there's nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days."

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. "The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end," he said. "I never got free health care. My brother's wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, 'Nothing.' It should never get to that point where somebody's getting free health care. Something's way out of whack there."

Ultimately, this was the measure of the past 16 months: what self-government looks like, who it serves, and how — whether that's measured in the election by the amount of out-of-state money that flows into the process, or something as simple as one government worker wondering if another government worker was getting over on him somehow. These are questions worthy of ferocity because they are questions regarding things of immeasurable value.

As the Walker rally broke up, a noisy claque of protesters lined the sidewalk along Oklahoma Avenue outside the Serb Hall. I was glad they were there, chanting and banging their drums while the Walker supporters honked their car horns to drown them out, not because I agreed with them, but simply because they were there, howling under the wide strawberry moon. This, as the chant goes, is what democracy looks like.